alt Hacker NewsThanks, I hadn’t considered the plastic on the pepper grinder. Guess I’ll be looking for a new pepper grinder as I continue my pursuit of removing plastic and dangerous chemicals from the kitchen. So far the pans, tupperware, and cooking utensils have all been replaced.
While not food, another not so frequently talked about plastic exposure could be clothing dryer vents pushing materials from synthetic clothing into the air. It’s likely less of a problem than the rubber tires on our cars making their way into the air. But it was something that occurred to me while cleaning out the dryer vent this past weekend.
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Your biggest exposure is going to be water, hands down. What you store it in, how you filter it, these are going to be major sources of plastics and pfas.
I've been using a mortar and pestle. Easy to control fineness and no plastic to be concerned with.
Same here. I am going to disassemble the cheap pepper grinders I recently bought to make sure there is no plastic in the grinding operation.
I switched to bamboo toothbrushes from plastic a while ago, before de-plasticizing was really a thing. Now I'm glad I did, because plastic bristles grinding against my teeth seems like an easy way for plastic to get inside my body. The bamboo toothbrushes are pretty nice too, the bristles are soft but firm, and the handle is made of bamboo too.
I’m definitely buying natural fiber clothing moving forward for this reason.
However, I wonder how bad eating bits of the plastic burr grinder actually is. Presumably, they mostly pass through. Stomach acid probably leaches a bunch of stuff, but is it worse than (say) canned tomatoes that were sitting in a plastic liner for a year? I’d wager the grinder bits have a lot of surface area from scarring. That’d increase leaching.
Anyway, I strongly recommend small turkish-style grinders:
https://bazaaranatolia.com/products/turkish-grinder-pepper-m...
(No idea if this brand is decent; the form factor is great, especially for $14)
It has roughly a single-recipe capacity, so I stick crushed red pepper flakes, cumin seed, celery seed, black pepper kernels, etc in it per the recipe, then grind until it is empty. The burr on the one I linked is metal.
I’d probably prefer stainless body + whatever is commonly used for espresso grinders, assuming such a gadget exists.